Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 108

Dearest Conny and Lotts

I swear that you are an idle and lazy pair, never to send a note to amuse a brother who’s longing & yearning for news. By the way tell Judy, but don’t let mama know, that ‘the wife’s name’s Baptista, the Duke’s name’s Gonzago’.* Break the news gently, console her, beware, of telling her more than her small heart can bear.

And now I suppose you both are keen, to hear what I’ve done and what I have seen. Well I’ve seen the Prince of Whales, not a fairy one, but one alive in the London Aquarium, and I’ve seen them feed him on codfish and eels, and by Jove, how his highness waltzed into his meals. And I’ve been to museums and been to the ‘Zoo’, and been to the concerts & theatre too, and seen Irving act in a part that is new, and now, my darlings, I’ll wish you adieu. Hoping that soon you’ll be able to see

your affectionate brother

Arthur C. D.

His next assistantship was with a Dr Henry Francis Elliot of Cliffe House, Ruyton-XI-Towns, a Shropshire village off the beaten track from Shrewsbury. It was a country practice that, Arthur joked to Lottie, required some adjustment on his part:

They are such funny people, when I came first I couldn’t understand it. A big farmer would come up to the surgery, and say to me ‘I wants a subscription, Zurr, to take to the seaside with me, the same subscription as t’other doctor gave me,’ and then I would speak to him like a father, lifting up my voice and saying ‘Get away, you hulking ruffian, it doesn’t matter to us what the other doctor gave; why do you go to the seaside if you can’t afford it without a subscription?’ and then it would turn out that the poor man only wanted a prescription after all. ‘I doan’t know wot medicine it were, but it were brown-like, wi’ a nasty taste,’ and then they expect you to make up a few hundred known medicines with nasty tastes, and let them taste away until they expire or hit on the right one.

The young man got on better with Dr Elliot, but not entirely successfully either, and from Conan Doyle’s letters one would not guess Elliot was only in his mid-thirties at the time. In Memories and Adventures, recalling ‘a very quiet existence’ there, he said he could ‘trace some mental progress to that period, for I read and thought without interruption’.